Munro’s Stories – A Zipped File Concealed Lives –
Unzipping Files To Reveal Fragile Daily Triviality And A Tempest Of Cruelty And Coldness

Dear Life is an adaptation of a short story by Nobel laureate Alice Munro, whose stories usually explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style, revealing melodramatic plots and relations or strong desires with the description of subtle movements and ambiguous dialogues in our daily life. The lightness in her language seems to stem from the inability to bear or squarely look into or desire for the heaviness in our lives.

Taiwanese novelist Egoyan Zheng has once described that “Munro’s writing style fathoms the shape of fate.”

This production extracts plots, structures and styles from various stories of Munro’s and then adapt and rewrite them in accordance with different performers and theatric styles so as to put the stories into the comprehensible context of life in Taiwan. Five episodes are separate from yet echo with each other. With the same seemingly plain tone and language with Munro, the production lays out the foundation of life that is beyond description, ambiguous, entangled and heavy. Audiences will see all the characters devoted to the rehearsals between void and performance – alienated, realistic, yet unreal – just like the performance of real life.

DIRECTOR │ WANG CHIA-MING

WANG Chia-ming, founder and director of Shakespeare's Wild Sisters Group, has been working on experimental theater for years and has always kept his creative works a fusion of tradition and innovation, a daring integration of popularity and avant-garde. He is also absorbed in probing the possibilities of new expressions on languages, performance and audio/voice in theater through cooperation with artists from cross genres. With the experiment of empty space and the use of voice, he forces performers to explore, to embrace and to deliberate on the possibilities of theater, thereby creating a unique style in the contemporary Taiwanese theater. His works have twice won the Taishin Arts Awards: the First Prize of Performing Arts and Jury's Special Award.

PRODUCTION TEAM

  • Production Team/ Shakespeare's Wild Sisters Group

  • Producer/ Yukio NITTA

  • Playwright&Director/ WANG Chia-ming

  • Performers/ Fa、 AN Yuan-liang、 HUANG Pei-shu、 Sunny YANG、 YU Pei-zhen、 CHEN Wu-kang, and others.

  • Lighting Design/ WANG Tien-hung

  • Costume Design/ LAI Hsuan-wu, KAO Chia-lin

  • Music Design/ Blaire KO, LIN Fang-yi

  • Video Design/ Ray SUN

  • Percussionist/ YU Rho-mei

  • Duration: Approx. 110 minutes without intermission.

  • Pre-talk: 30 minutes before the evening show on 3/23(Fri)、3/24(Sat.) and Matiness on 3/24(Sat.) at the lobby of National Theater.

  • Post-talk: 3/25(Sun.) at the lobby of National Theater.

  • WEBSITE: www.swsg95.com.tw